Binding, Ligature, and Impotence
The knotted cord, and psychogenic impotence.
In the Texts
The ligatura, the spell that binds a bridegroom so that he cannot consummate his marriage, is the commonest maleficium in the manuals after the sickening of children: done with a knotted cord at the moment of the blessing, undone by finding the cord, by the rite, or by the remedies Canale lists for the cold and the obstructed. The Malleus Maleficarum gives it a whole question.
What Medicine Makes of It
Erectile failure under expectation and fear is among the best-documented of psychosomatic events, and the wedding night, with its audience and its stakes, is its classic occasion; once it has happened, the fear of its happening again makes it happen. The manuals’ remedy, finding and untying the knot, is a convincing ritual of release, and it worked for the same reason that the diagnosis of a sympathetic physician works now. The warming herbs Canale gives are the aphrodisiacs of the Galenic kitchen and did nothing but reassure.
The Evidence
- The Malleus (1487) devotes Part I, question 9 to whether witches can take away the male member, and Part II, chapter 6 to the ligature, which it calls the commonest maleficium.
- Masters and Johnson (1970) found psychogenic erectile failure the commonest sexual complaint of men, with “performance anxiety” its mechanism, and treated it by removing the demand.
- Flandrin (1979) shows that French bridegrooms of the seventeenth century feared the ligature enough that marriages were sometimes held in secret or at night to escape the witch at the church door.
- The cure by untying is a “ritual of release” in Frank’s sense, and the modern sildenafil has a placebo response of around 25 per cent in trials (Goldstein et al., 1998), the meaning response working beside the drug.
- The accusation had victims: the ligature was among the charges in the trials of Lorraine and the Franche-Comté studied by Briggs (1996), usually against a woman the bridegroom had rejected.
Where They Part
The manuals located the cause in a neighbour’s malice, the clinic in the patient’s own fear, and both agreed that belief could cure it. The accusation, however, had a cost the clinic’s explanation does not: someone had to have tied the knot.
In the Materia Medica
Sources
- Malleus Maleficarum (1487), I.q.9 and II.q.1.c.6.
- Flandrin, J.-L. (1979). Families in Former Times. Cambridge University Press.
- Masters, W. H., and Johnson, V. E. (1970). Human Sexual Inadequacy. Little, Brown.
Historical and interpretive; not medical advice.